Terminology

What is the term one can use for “imposed autobiography”? Imposed narrative? Distography? (“dis” as in distal, distance, dissing someone – an emphasis on otherness through the manufacture of a “personal” narrative of the other’s experiences (which are otherwise unknown and unninterrogated.)

Kevlar is tough, it’s woven, and it’s layered. Could this be applied as a metaphor for the ways in which ideologies become integrated as a coherent sense of identity within the individual psyche? And then the psyche can become “frayed” when some experiences cannot be connected (woven) together through a coherent ideological paradigm. This could…

There is a case in Florida where one school district has re-segregated their schools. Students who are trapped in what have become almost all-black schools (or is it black and hispanic and no whites? this I should check) are not receiving the educational preparation they need, and studies indicate that integrated schools do lead to…

Is there a difference between collection (per Van Den Eede), attachment, and ownership? I’m thinking the trauma of loss versus the trauma of absence (Saunders? Or LaCapra?) I also think of this in terms of the controversy surrounding Donald Trump. Many people appear John to his campaign because they feel that their ownership of what…

Gornick’s description of life writing that reveals the “loneliness of the monster” and the “cunning of the innocent” is exactly the performance of standpoint, the portrayal of understanding one’s social position within the greater cultural hierarchy. This inherently questions the assumptions of hierarchy. The point of vantage, on the other hand, is to establish one’s…

Time is a resource. “Dwell time” is used to measure how long visitors spend reading a website. A similar concept might apply to issues of social justice – but in the classroom, instructors can curate the readings, and then grade student’s based on their performance of active “engagement.” This gets at the crux of Amato…

As the case of Cecil the Lion shows, there is a lot of “relativism” in the rhetorics of trauma. People will criticize others for supporting the cause of “justice for Cecil” when there are so many other injustices occuring every day. For myself, it gets a bit depressing looking at the social media and seeing…

The recent attention given to mass shootings has raised many complex issues of individual freedom and public safety – namely, we have no reliable institution means of determining who may commit murder due to neurological/psychological “imbalance.” Our tools for “diagnosis” and “pathology” aren’t just limited – they are also suspect, given long histories of racism,…

&#x200b; N. Katherine Hayles is concerned that the increasing disconnect between digital media scholars and traditional (i.e. print-based) scholars will lead to significant losses in knowledge: Print-based scholars would become increasingly marginalized, unable to communicate not only with Digital Humanities colleagues but also with researchers in the social sciences and sciences, who routinely use digital…

Bill O’Reilly doesn’t categorize his own upbringing as “abusive.” Many Euro-Americans don’t see the treatment of Native Americans as genocide. How do we decide what “counts” as trauma? Who decides this? Does surviving one trauma grant one the authority to gauge the traumas of others?